El Salvador student takes to treetops to pick up signal for online classes

Nelson Renteria

ATIQUIZAYA, El Salvador (Reuters) - When Alexander Contreras and his father planted a guava tree next to their house in rural El Salvador six years ago, he never dreamed that beyond providing shade and food, it would become key to his college education.
Alexander Contreras sits on a tree to receive a university class on his cellphone because it is the only place where he has signal during a quarantine throughout the country, as the government undertakes steadily stricter measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Atiquizaya, El Salvador April 17, 2020. Picture taken April 17, 2020. REUTERS/Jose Cabezas

But since the government of President Nayib Bukele suspended in-person classes a little over a month ago to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, 20-year-old Contreras has been climbing to the top of the tree to get the signal he needs to connect to his online university classes.

Unable to log on from the humble, dirt-floor home he shares with his parents and five other relatives, Contreras said he was frustrated because he knew the clock was ticking and thought he might have to drop a class or even miss the whole school year.

“I told myself I had to find a solution, and thank God I did. I saw the tree and I thought if I climb to the top the signal will probably reach me,” the communications student said.

Scaling the tree was enough to pick up a weak signal in the poor Atiquizaya municipality, about 84 kilometers (52 miles) west of capital city San Salvador.

So Monday through Thursday Contreras has been climbing the tree with a cellphone and headphones in hand, mask on face, perching between two branches for up to four hours at a time to take classes in design, journalism and marketing.

Last week, Bukele shared photos on social media of Contreras studying in the tree and ordered Innovation Secretary Vladimir Handal to contact the young man.

“Connect a device to get him a free and good broadband signal. Tell him I say congratulations,” Bukele wrote in a Twitter post that has garnered over 56,000 likes.

Now, Contreras can take classes from his living room after Bukele’s government sent him a WiFi device, a laptop and a new cellphone.

Others sent Contreras gifts after seeing his photo: a desk, chair, lamp, and a fan to help ease the scorching heat.

“Being up there is very uncomfortable. Sitting for so long... the sun, the heat. I’m going to be a little more comfortable now,” said Contreras.

NO FRIEND OF PUTIN
Ex-Georgian president Saakashvili poised for another political comeback in Ukraine

Ilya Zhegulev

KIEV (Reuters) - The former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, said on Wednesday he had been invited to become deputy prime minister of Ukraine in charge of driving reforms, in what would mark another comeback for the maverick politician.
FILE PHOTO: Former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili arrives in Kiev as his supporter shows the decree of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, which restores Saakashvili's citizenship, at Boryspil International Airport outside Kiev, Ukraine May 29, 2019. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

One of the most recognizable leaders in the post-Soviet world, Saakashvili was brought in to run the southern Odessa region of Ukraine in 2015 but fell out with the president at the time, Petro Poroshenko.

Saakashvili said he had been invited to join the government of the current president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose candidacy he backed in last year’s election.

He will join at a time when Ukraine faces a recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and the government is trying to secure an $8 billion loan package from the International Monetary Fund that is contingent on Kiev’s reform performance.

“It is a great honour for me to receive from President Zelenskiy an offer to become deputy prime minister of the Ukrainian government for reform,” Saakashvili wrote on Facebook.

“We have a very difficult period ahead ... we now have more than ever to be courageous in our decisions and reforms.”

David Arakhamia, the head of Zelenskiy’s Servant of the People faction, told Reuters that parliament could vote on Saakashvili’s appointment on Friday.

Arakhamia said Saakashvili was suited to a broad-ranging role in fighting corruption and that his abilities had not been properly used in Ukraine before.

Zelenskiy’s office said the president had met Saakashvili to discuss Saakashvili’s vision of how he might help Ukraine’s development.

“Mikheil Saakashvili is well known in the international arena and has already demonstrated experience of the successful implementation of reforms,” his office said.

Saakashvili had been hired to run Odessa five years ago based on his track record of fighting corruption as president of Georgia after the 2003 Rose Revolution.

He resigned as governor in 2016 and accused Poroshenko of corruption, which Poroshenko denied.

The Ukrainian authorities stripped Saakashvili of his citizenship when he was abroad, but he barged his way through a checkpoint at the Polish border to get back into Ukraine in September 2017. He was deported five months later.

Saakashvili returned to Ukraine last year after Zelenskiy restored his citizenship in one of his first official acts as president.

Alexander Rodnyansky, an economist at Britain’s Cambridge University and former adviser to the Ukrainian government, told Reuters Saakashvili’s arrival would be positive for reforms.

“I have always respected Georgia’s experience and the reforms that it has carried out, and I hope that this will not break any political balances,” he said.

One in three UK households expects to need state help to weather coronavirus: survey

Cyclists are seen wearing protective face masks in Battersea Park during the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in London, Britain April 21, 2020. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez

LONDON (Reuters) - One third of British households said they were likely to need government support within the next three months to weather the coronavirus outbreak, according to a survey that reveals growing pessimism about job security and the health of the economy.

Research firm Kantar said 44% of those working believed their job was less safe than it was 12 months ago, the highest recorded measure since it began the survey in August 2011.

Confidence in the health of the British economy had also slumped since the country was put into effective lockdown in March, with 65% of people stating the economy was doing worse than 12 months ago, Kantar said on Wednesday.


Britain’s budget forecaster has said economic output could plunge by 35% in the April-June period and 2 million people could lose their jobs due to the impact of the virus.

The government has launched an economic rescue package totalling more than half a trillion dollars that includes paying up to 80% of salary costs to minimise redundancies and guaranteeing up to 80% of bank loans to small businesses.

The public widely supported intervention, the survey found, with 84% of people either agreeing or strongly agreeing that the government should help people and business affected by coronavirus, whatever the cost.


Six in 10 people said the government was handling the coronavirus crisis fairly or very well, helping boost support for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives to 54%, up 4 percentage points since March, while three in 10 said it was handling it fairly or very poorly.

Craig Watkins, UK chief executive of Kantar’s Public division, said: “These findings show that there is a growing majority who believe the government is handling the crisis well and a strong public belief that supporting people and business during this time should be a priority, no matter the cost.”

Kantar interviewed 1,118 adults online between April 16 and April 20 for the survey.

Exclusive: Trial of Gilead's potential coronavirus treatment running ahead of schedule, researcher says

GILEAD WAS ALREADY TESTING THIS DRUG FOR OTHER PURPOSES

ITS EFFICACY IS STILL IN DOUBT DUE TO LACK OF TESTING

GILEAD IS PROFITEERING

Deena Beasley

(Reuters) - A key U.S. government trial of Gilead Sciences Inc’s experimental coronavirus treatment may yield results as early as mid-May, according to the study’s lead investigator, after doctors clamored to enroll their patients in the study.



FILE PHOTO: An ampule of Ebola drug remdesivir is pictured during a news conference at the University Hospital Eppendorf (UKE) in Hamburg, Germany, April 8, 2020, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues. Ulrich Perrey/File Photo

Preliminary findings from the randomized trial of the antiviral drug remdesivir, begun in February by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), could come even sooner, lead researcher Dr. Andre Kalil told Reuters in an interview. There are currently no approved treatments or vaccines for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new virus that has killed over 190,000 people globally, according to a Reuters tally.

Remdesivir has drawn tremendous attention as a therapy with the potential to alter the course of the disease, based on anecdotal reports that it may have helped some patients.
Those hopes were dampened somewhat on Thursday, when details from a Chinese remdesivir trial in patients with severe COVID-19 inadvertently released by the World Health Organization suggested it provided no benefit.

Gilead pushed back on that interpretation saying the study, which was stopped early due to low patient enrollment, cannot provide meaningful conclusions.

Other reports have provided reason for optimism.

Doctors at Houston Methodist Hospital told Reuters that since March 23, they have treated 41 mostly severely ill COVID-19 patients with the drug. None have died and half are back home. But they and other doctors contacted by Reuters said they need much more information than the few details available from the Chinese trial and anecdotal reports on its emergency use in the United States to form a view on remdesivir.

They emphasized a need to see how patients on remdesivir fare compared to those who do not receive the therapy in a rigorous clinical trial at different stages of illness to know whether and under what circumstances it may provide benefit.

The NIAID trial “has all the necessary scientific standards that are really going to help us define if this drug works or not,” said Dr. Kalil, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. It is a randomized, double-blind study in which half the patients were given the drug and the other half a placebo. Enrollment in the trial closed on Sunday, but has far exceeded initial goals of 400 to 500 patients, he said. The investigator would not disclose total enrollment, but the latest public update says trial size may exceed 800 patients. The NIAID trial is designed to show whether remdesivir, when given to patients with a range of disease severity, improves outcomes such as length of hospitalization, need for mechanical ventilation and survival. Dr. Kalil declined to comment on precisely how much of an improvement on those metrics is needed to deem the trial a success and the drug a viable treatment. “We are looking for not only a statistical difference, but also for a meaningful clinical improvement,” he said. “We expect to have results sometime from mid- to late May.”

Gilead on Thursday said it expected results from the NIAID trial in late May. The company’s shares, up more than 20% so far this year due largely to remdesivir prospects, were 1.7% higher at $79.10 on Friday.

A lack of hard evidence has given U.S. medical associations, as well as the National Institutes of Health, pause. They have not recommended remdesivir to treat COVID-19.

The Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), which represents more than 12,000 U.S. specialists, said it will make a formal recommendation once the entire body of evidence for remdesivir is available.

Dr. Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who helped draft the IDSA guidelines, explained that most patients with COVID-19 will recover with little or no medical care. He is awaiting more clinical trial data before remdesivir can be deemed a useful therapy.

 EARLY INTERVENTION?

In general, doctors say they would expect remdesivir to work better if given early in the course of the disease. The drug, which previously failed as a treatment for Ebola, is designed to keep a virus from replicating in the body and overwhelming a patient’s immune system.

“You can put out a campfire, but once it becomes a wildfire it’s hard to control,” said Dr. Kevin Grimes, an infectious disease specialist at Houston Methodist, which is participating in Gilead studies.

Gilead is leading its own trials of remdesivir, which is given to hospitalized patients as an intravenous infusion: One in patients with severe disease and the other in patients with more moderate symptoms.

The company expanded the number of patients it would enroll in the severe disease trial to 6,000 from 2,400, and expects results at the end of April. But that study does not compare remdesivir to another treatment or placebo.

The medical news website STAT last week reported that nearly all participants in Gilead-sponsored studies at a University of Chicago hospital saw rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, and many were discharged in less than a week. The New England Journal of Medicine previously published an analysis showing that two-thirds of a small group of severely ill COVID-19 patients improved after treatment with remdesivir.

But it is impossible to know whether those outcomes can be attributed to the drug in the absence of a control group that did not far as well, since so much is still unknown about this new virus.

Still, these reports provide reason for hope given the desperate need as the virus rampages around the globe.

“We were asked to participate in this trial and we jumped at it,” said Grimes. “We see people that are getting sicker and then they get better.”

---30---

In four U.S. state prisons, nearly 3,300 inmates test positive for coronavirus -- 96% without symptomsLinda So, Grant Smith

(Reuters) - When the first cases of the new coronavirus surfaced in Ohio’s prisons, the director in charge felt like she was fighting a ghost.

“We weren’t always able to pinpoint where all the cases were coming from,” said Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. As the virus spread, they began mass testing.

They started with the Marion Correctional Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners in north central Ohio, many of them older with pre-existing health conditions. After testing 2,300 inmates for the coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the 2,028 who tested positive, close to 95% had no symptoms.

“It was very surprising,” said Chambers-Smith, who oversees the state’s 28 correctional facilities.

As mass coronavirus testing expands in prisons, large numbers of inmates are showing no symptoms. In four state prison systems — Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia — 96% of 3,277 inmates who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic, according to interviews with officials and records reviewed by Reuters. That’s out of 4,693 tests that included results on symptoms.

The numbers are the latest evidence to suggest that people who are asymptomatic — contagious but not physically sick — may be driving the spread of the virus, not only in state prisons that house 1.3 million inmates across the country, but also in communities across the globe. The figures also reinforce questions over whether testing of just people suspected of being infected is actually capturing the spread of the virus.

“It adds to the understanding that we have a severe undercount of cases in the U.S.,” said Dr. Leana Wen, adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University, said of the Reuters findings. “The case count is likely much, much higher than we currently know because of the lack of testing and surveillance.”


Some people diagnosed as asymptomatic when tested for the coronavirus, however, may go on to develop symptoms later, according to researchers.

The United States has more people behind bars than any other nation, a total incarcerated population of nearly 2.3 million as of 2017 — nearly half of which is in state prisons. Smaller numbers are locked in federal prisons and local jails, which typically hold people for relatively short periods as they await trial.

State prison systems in Michigan, Tennessee and California have also begun mass testing — checking for coronavirus infections in large numbers of inmates even if they show no sign of illness — but have not provided specific counts of asymptomatic prisoners.

Tennessee said a majority of its positive cases didn’t show symptoms. In Michigan, state authorities said “a good number” of the 620 prisoners who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic. California’s state prison system would not release counts of asymptomatic prisoners.

Each state manages multiple prison facilities. Ohio, for instance, has 49,000 prisoners in 28 facilities. A total 3,837 inmates tested positive for the coronavirus in 15 of those facilities. But the state has not yet provided results on symptoms for 1,809 of them and did not identify the total number of tests conducted across the prison system.

Arkansas and Tennessee have also taken a targeted approach by conducting mass testing in several of their facilities. Michigan, North Carolina, California and Virginia have started with one facility each.

Most state prisons did not provide the age or other demographic details of those who tested positive for the coronavirus, which has killed more than 200,000 people globally, including more than 53,000 in the United States.

VAST UNDERCOUNT
Reuters surveyed all 50 state prison systems. Of the 30 that responded, most are only testing inmates who show symptoms, suggesting they could be vastly undercounting the number infected by the coronavirus.

Florida and Texas, whose inmate populations are bigger than Ohio’s, report a combined total of just 931 cases — far fewer than the 3,837 inmates who tested positive in Ohio. New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, has reported 269 positive cases among 51,000 inmates. All three states are testing only symptomatic prisoners.

“Prison agencies are almost certainly vastly undercounting the number of COVID cases among incarcerated persons,” said Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist and senior lecturer at the University of Texas. “Just as the experts are telling us in our free-world communities, the only way to get ahead of this outbreak is through mass testing.”

Prison officials in Florida and Texas said they were following guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention along with state health officials when testing only inmates showing symptoms of the virus. New York’s Department of Corrections said its policy of only testing prisoners who show symptoms was “reflective of testing procedures in the general public.”

Tennessee took an aggressive approach after a dozen inmates tested positive at the Bledsoe County Correctional Complex in the city of Pikeville last week. The state’s Department of Correction has tested 3,503 prisoners at Bledsoe, the Northwest Correctional Complex and the Turney Center Industrial Complex.

As of Friday, 651 were positive, and most of them were asymptomatic, the department said.

“It’s what makes the pandemic more difficult to manage,” said Marc Stern, former medical director for the Washington State Department of Corrections and a faculty member at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. “There are a whole lot of people who are asymptomatic.”  




FILE PHOTO: The exterior of the Marion Correctional Institution where there have been positive cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Marion, Ohio, U.S., April 22, 2020. REUTERS/Dane Rhys

After a recent spike in cases at the Neuse Correctional Institution in Goldsboro, North Carolina, state correctional officials tested all 723 prisoners last week. Of the 444 who were infected by the virus, 98% were asymptomatic, the state’s department of public safety said. One inmate has died at the prison.

Similarly, mass testing at two Arkansas prisons — the Cummins Unit in the city of Grady and the Community Correction Center in the state capital Little Rock — found 751 infected inmates, almost all of them asymptomatic, the state corrections department said. It did not provide the total number of inmates who were tested.

Arkansas’ prisons have faced contagious disease outbreaks before, such as scabies and chickenpox, but those episodes were easier to manage because inmates showed overt symptoms, said Arkansas Department of Corrections spokeswoman Dina Tyler. “But with this virus, you have no idea because so many are asymptomatic. It makes it very challenging to contain,” she said.
‘24-HOUR TURNAROUND IS CRUCIAL’

Michigan’s Lakeland Correctional Facility houses some of the state’s oldest and most medically frail prisoners. When coronavirus cases surged, the prison saw a spike in infections and deaths. As of April 23, nine Lakeland inmates had died from COVID-19, accounting for a third of the deaths across Michigan’s 29 state prisons.

Nearly half of Lakeland’s 1,400 prisoners suffer from chronic underlying health conditions, according to state data. Many are in wheelchairs, and the minimum-security facility in southern Michigan has its own geriatric unit for its large elderly population.

On Tuesday, the prison tested all 400 inmates in the geriatric ward and plans to test the rest of the facility by the end of the week. Of the 971 tested so far, 642, or about 66%, were positive. A state official declined to disclose how many were asymptomatic.

“We know mass testing is going to make our numbers spike and might make us look bad,” said Chris Gautz, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections. “But I don’t think there’s another prison system in the country that doesn’t have large numbers. They just might not be testing as rigorously as we are.”


All tested inmates are quarantined in their rooms or units pending the test results, which usually come back in a day, he said. “The 24-hour turnaround is crucial” because once an inmate tests negative, they can return to the general population, he said.

In the seven state prison systems conducting mass tests, 49 inmates have died.

As the coronavirus spreads behind bars, rights groups and public defenders say they fear more will succumb, and have pressed for the release of nonviolent older and medically high-risk inmates. While thousands have been let out, crowded, often unsanitary conditions have raised concerns that jails and prisons could become vectors for the disease.

“They’re worse than landlocked cruise ships,” Stern, the corrections expert, said, referring to stranded cruise ships that have been overwhelmed by coronavirus infections.


Linda So reported from Washington and Grant Smith from New York. Additional reporting by Brad Heath. Editing by Jason Szep

'I do feel afraid': Indian workers disinfect coronavirus hotspots
DALITS AKA THE UNTOUCHABLES SUBJECTED TO HAVING TO DO THIS WORK BECAUSE OF HINDU FASCISM, CASTISM AND RACISM 

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - One recent morning in his two-room New Delhi home, sanitation worker Dev Dutt Sharma drank tea before putting on an orange jacket and bidding goodbye to his two sons, wife, and elderly mother.

He rode his motorbike to government offices in South Delhi, where he suited up in protective gear and strapped a container full of disinfectant on his back.

Then he ventured out to disinfect some of Delhi’s crowded slums and neighborhoods deemed at risk from the coronavirus, which has infected more than 20,000 people and killed 652 in India.

“I do feel afraid, because I have a family,” said Sharma, 38, who is one of more than 3,500 workers usually tasked with combating malaria for the South Delhi Municipal Corporation.

“But then I think that, along with my own family, I will also save other families.”

The plight of India’s under-protected medical workers has drawn widespread attention, but workers disinfecting cities are also at risk as they venture into designated containment zones.

“Wherever we get more than three or four cases from a single locality, we are taking special measures in those areas,” said N.R. Tuli, a doctor in charge of disinfections in a South Delhi area.

Such measures boost sanitation and strengthen awareness of government actions, said virologist Shahid Jameel.

“The latter increases the level of trust that is so important for people to follow instructions,” added Jameel, the chief executive of health charity the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance.

India’s population of 1.3 billion has been subjected to one of the world’s toughest lockdowns, confining people to their homes except for trips to buy food and medicine until May 3.

To help rein in the virus, Sharma disinfects as many as 80 homes a day. But when the work ends, anxiety returns to haunt him.

“When I come back home, I also feel, ‘What if this virus is inside me and might get transmitted to my children?’,” he said. “But we are helpless, we have to perform our duty.”

On the margins of Paris, the food bank queues grow longer

Yonathan Van der Voort

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France (Reuters) - The queue for the food bank snaked for hundreds of metres, out of the shuttered marketplace bordered by tower blocks and down the side of a four-lane highway on the outskirts of one of Europe’s wealthiest cities.
Residents line up during a food distribution by volunteers from ACLEFEU association in Clichy-sous-Bois near Paris during a lockdown imposed to slow the rate of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in France, April 22, 2020. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

In Paris’s depressed suburbs, the number of people relying on food handouts is soaring as a strict coronavirus lockdown plunges France into its deepest recession since World War Two.

Many worked in the grey economy before the outbreak, and now receive little protection from France’s generous welfare state.

“There were lots of women who worked looking after children... There was a whole economy based on getting by,” said Bachir Ghouinem, volunteering at the food bank in Clichy-sous-Bois, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the city centre.


“So as everything stopped what did people find themselves with? Nothing.”

He and other volunteers would end up handing out sugar, pasta, cheese, milk and fresh fruit and vegetables - most donated by local stores rather than large retail chains - to around 1,600 families during the day, twice the number expected.

Clichy-sous-Bois is part of the Paris banlieues, the low-income districts that encircle the city. Unemployment among its largely immigrant population was already well above the national average before the epidemic struck.

Queueing for food, Nathalie Barlagne, 46, said she had lost her job as a creche assistant before the crisis.


She had never before needed to rely on charity to support her family but could no longer afford her food bill after local markets closed. “Now we have to shop in supermarkets and it’s very expensive,” she said.
“WE’RE ALL HERE FOR THE SAME REASON”

As the queue lengthened, Mohamed Mechmach, founder of local charity ACLEFEU, urged those in line to respect social distancing rules.

“Otherwise we won’t be able to keep doing what we’re doing,” he told the crowd. “The prefect will just say ‘Stop everything’. That would be a shame. We’re all here for the same reason.”

In the banlieues, the strict curbs ordered by President Emmanuel Macron to try to contain the epidemic have exacerbated deep-seated social tensions.


Slideshow (11 Images)

Cramped social housing, workers with frontline jobs and a restless younger generation have turned some into hotspots of infection and unrest. Violence hit several neighbourhood for five straight nights over the past week.

Due west of Clichy-sous-Bois in another suburb, Argenteuil, Kante Sakho’s charity was delivering food parcels to households. He says he is shifting 600 a week, and is barely able to keep up with demand.

Some recipients were illiterate and unable to fill out the mandatory government forms justifying movement outside the home. Others were families struggling to feed their children three meals a day after schools shut down.

“Since the coronavirus outbreak, there’s a lot more poverty,” Sakho said.


Reporting by Yonathan Van der Voort; Writing by Richard Lough; editing by John Stonestreet

ICRC donates vital medical equipment to Gaza in coronavirus crisis

Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Thursday donated vital intensive care equipment to Gaza hospitals but said they remain underequipped for any wider outbreak of the new coronavirus in the territory.


Palestinian workers check medical equipment donated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) amid concerns about the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Kerem Shalom crossing in the southern Gaza Strip April 21, 2020. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

With passage through Gaza’s borders tightly controlled by neighbouring Israel and Egypt, only 17 people have tested positive in the Palestinian territory for the novel coronavirus.

But health authorities are concerned about the risk of widespread infection among a population of two million living in close quarters in the small coastal enclave.

“The prospect of an outbreak of COVID-19 in Gaza is frightening, given the weakness of the health infrastructure and the dense population of the Gaza Strip,” said Daniel Duvillard, head of the ICRC Delegation in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The ICRC aid included a ventilator, monitors, defibrillators and suction devices and pumps.


“This equipment will help, but much more is needed, and we urge the international community to recognise the seriousness of the risk here,” Duvillard said.

The ICRC said there were only 93 ventilators in Gaza, or one for every 21,505 persons in the territory, where quarantine facilities have been set up by local health authorities for Palestinians who enter via Egypt or Israel.

Health officials in Gaza said they were in immediate need of 100 ventilators, 140 intensive care unit beds and $23 million for their anti-coronavirus emergency plan.

“Gaza is facing this COVID-19 pandemic with its fragile and over-stretched health system, due to long years of closure and siege and poverty and shortages of many resources,” said Abdullatif Alhaj of Gaza’s health ministry.

Palestinians say 13 years of economic sanctions by Israel and its border blockade have crippled their economy and undermined the development of medical facilities, weakening their ability to face a pandemic.


Israel has promised to ensure medical aid reaches Gaza to combat the coronavirus crisis. It has said its long-standing blockade helps prevent money and weapons from reaching the Islamist group Hamas, which has run the enclave since 2007.

Gaza is not yet under full lockdown, but as the holy fasting month of Ramadan starts people are extremely cautious about visiting each other and spending savings.


Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Alexandra Hudson

REWILDING
Emboldened by closures, foxes prowl an ancient port city in Israel

ASHKELON, Israel (Reuters) - Red foxes have been making appearances in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, drawn out from the seclusion of the desert dunes by the coronavirus lockdown that has kept people off the streets.

The animals, usually a rare sight in busy urban areas, have a biblical resonance. In the Book of Lamentations, the Jewish temple site in Jerusalem is described as so desolate that “foxes prowl upon it”.

In Ashkelon, an ancient Mediterranean seaport and now one of Israel’s main southern cities, a family of foxes has become a regular feature - nosing through discarded food, and playing sometimes unfriendly hide-and-seek with dogs in a local park.

Lisbon zoo animals feel keepers' love while public away

Catarina Demony

LISBON (Reuters) - Wearing a mask and other protective gear, a zookeeper at Portugal’s biggest zoo feeds a mob of energetic meerkats, including a few newborns - but the usual excited onlookers are nowhere to be seen.

Zookeeper Estefania gives food to the bongos at the Lisbon Zoo as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Lisbon, Portugal April 23, 2020. REUTERS/Rafael Marchante

Though the meerkats and other 2,000 animals at the Lisbon zoo are missing the normal attention from crowds of visitors now stuck at home due to the coronavirus lockdown, keepers are doing their best to provide company and nurture.

“The work we do now the zoo is closed is exactly the same as what we used to do when the zoo was open,” zoo curator Jose Dias Ferreira told Reuters as a group of gorillas played behind him.

“We closed doors to the public but animal care, cleaning and feeding is the same.”

The zoo closed when Portugal declared a lockdown on March 18, shutting all non-essential services, from restaurants to cultural spaces. But the contingency plan at Lisbon zoo was put together way before.

Ferreira said the zoo had to stock up on animal food in case increased demand during the pandemic caused a shortage. For now food supply remains plentiful, but the future is uncertain.

No visitors means no ticket sales, leaving Lisbon zoo and others in a tight spot - especially as high maintenance costs are not going away.

“KEEP OUR ANIMALS SAFE”

Even if the lockdown ends soon and the zoo is able to reopen, it might be a while until people start visiting again given social distancing norms, anxiety among the public and a drop in foreign tourists.

“At the moment we have no problems but I cannot guess the future,” Ferreira said. “The only thing missing now is the visitors but animals can rapidly adapt to the situation.”

Portugal has so far reported 22,353 coronavirus cases and 820 deaths, a relatively low toll, especially compared to hard-hit neighbouring Spain.

Around the world, animals are being affected too.

Earlier this month, a tiger at the Bronx Zoo in New York City tested positive for the coronavirus, the first known case of a human infecting an animal and making it sick.

Ferreira said it was unclear if some animals were more at risk than others so the zoo’s preventive measures were applied to all.

To reduce risk, there are more disinfections, the use of masks and gloves was made compulsory, especially when near animals, and zookeepers were split into two rotating teams.

“The top priority is to keep our animals (...) and the people who work with them safe,” Ferreira said.


Reporting by Catarina Demony, Miguel Pereira and Rafael Marchante; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Andrew Cawthorne